Dear Sir, While the Irish Farmers’ Journal is usually fearlessly on the farmer’s side, the business feature from last week’s edition looking at the structure of the Irish dairy industry did dairy farmers and their co-ops a serious disservice. The article accuses co-ops of “empire building” at the expense of farmers, but it does so by citing wildly inaccurate statistics on the number of plants in the country. It suggests we have 15 liquid milk plants, there are eight; it suggests that we have 15 cheese plants (maybe if you include farmhouse or artisan producers), but there are only seven factory-scale plants. It asserts we have 16 or 17 powder and butter plants; and that somehow, we don’t need them.

The reality is that Irish farmers produce a billion litres of milk per month at peak, and around 150m litres per month during the winter. They choose to do that, because it makes their production efficient, and we support them to do so. Therefore, we need capacity, whether it’s butter churns, or dryers, to handle close to 40m litres per day at peak, and those facilities must be in place, operational, and maintained to world-class standards, even though many are closed for the winter. That results in our processing facilities operating, on average, at about 60% of installed capacity. That’s a fact of life; it’s the only efficient way to process a highly seasonal milk pool. It’s what our members demand of us.

Our co-ops have undertaken to process every single litre of milk that their members wanted to produce. Those farmers produced over two billion litres of additional milk, and it was all collected, processed, and sold on challenging global markets, to increasingly demanding customers. Not one litre of milk was spilled, no milk was exported as distressed, no farmer was forced to accept B prices, or told to curb production. Those things happened to farmers in neighbouring jurisdictions.

ICOS has no argument with the Irish Farmers Journal advocating for consolidation in the dairy industry; indeed, we agree with the principle. But citing wildly inaccurate statistics, and accusing co-ops of empire building is wrong, unfair, and does an enormous disservice to management and boards who have, at all times, acted in the interests of their members.

Clarification: The numbers of plants referred to all-island capacity and not country capacity as mentioned in the text.